At the end of her senior year, Africana studies major Kiana Sosa ’15 was awarded a Bristol Fellowship from Hamilton to spend a year traveling the globe to research a project she devised: She examined hip-hop culture related to the theatre arts.
Her first stop was London, where hip-hop dancers are exploring ways to incorporate theatre into their choreography. Sosa’s own focus is the other way around – incorporating hip-hop aesthetics into the theatre arts.
From London, her research took her to Italy, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa. There she worked with one of the country’s pioneering hip-hop musicians and break-dancers who now runs community workshops and afterschool programs for youth.
“It was such an inspiration just to sit with him and converse about how hip-hop and theatre can come together as a form of pedagogy and as a way of connecting with underserved youths,” she says.
Her fellowship at an end, Sosa entered a master’s degree program at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University to continue her study of hip-hop theatre. In the last year Sosa learned she wants to do it all: choreograph, write and dance. And she’s thinking she may go into teaching, working with young people on theatre with a hip-hop spin.
